The cost of a stormwater utility fee is comparable to the cost of a water or sewer utility fee. Customers essentially pay a charge to have stormwater removed from their properties.
What does a stormwater fee in Texas entail?
The stormwater utility is a monthly user fee that pays for stormwater system maintenance, enhancements, and other stormwater program operations. This charge is comparable to water, sewer, and waste utility rates.
What is a storm charge, and how does it work?
A stormwater fee is a levy placed on property owners to compensate for pollution caused by impermeable surface runoff in stormwater drainage.
This approach levies a fee proportional to the total impermeable area on a property, which includes concrete or asphalt driveways and roofs that prevent rain from infiltrating. In other words, the more impervious surfaces there are, the more stormwater is created and transported to the sewer, resulting in a larger stormwater tax.
What exactly is a hurricane recovery fee?
The amounts approved by the commission to recover, finance, or refinance storm-recovery expenses, financing costs, costs to replenish the storm-recovery reserve to the level that existed before the storm or storms, or any other level that the commission may authorize in a financing order, or
What exactly is stormwater, and where does it come from?
Stormwater is rainwater and ice/snow meltwater that either soaks into open soil or sits on top of impervious surfaces such as pavement or rooftops. Stormwater will eventually evaporate on a flat surface, although it is more often carried away as runoff. Pollutants are picked up by runoff as it flows to a storm drain or a neighboring water body. Stream degradation, floods, pollution, loss of fish and wildlife habitat, land erosion, and decreasing groundwater levels can all result from this runoff.
Various stormwater characteristics/contaminants are depicted in the diagram below, along with the related treatment method(s).
Some state and municipal governments have enacted stormwater management regulations and requirements that go beyond what the federal government requires. We recommend visiting the following resources to learn more about unique stormwater standards in your area:
Securitization, enabled by Senate Bill 559 and approved by N.C. Utilities Commission in 2019 rate cases, reduced storm recovery costs by 35%.
CHARLOTTE, N.C.Duke Energy customers in North Carolina will save $300 million in storm-related repair costs this year and next because to new legislation that allows the company to securitize the costs.
Residential customers of Duke Energy Progress (DEP) who use 1,000 kWh per month will save around 37% compared to typical storm cost recovery, with monthly bills increasing $2.44. The expected rate increase for Duke Energy Carolinas (DEC) home customers utilizing 1,000 kWh per month will be 49 cents per month, a 35 percent savings. Beginning with December invoices, the line item will be referred to as a “storm recovery charge.”
“Our top objective is to safely restore service to our customers, which we did quickly and effectively, significantly reducing outage time,” said Stephen De May, president of Duke Energy North Carolina. “We’re also always thinking about our customers’ bills, so we’re thrilled that this new cost recovery method allowed us to significantly lower storm repair expenses for our consumers.”
Customers will save money thanks to Senate Bill 559, which was passed in November 2019 and allows Duke Energy to securitize expenditures.
To put it another way, it wants to get paid for its storm damage repairs by selling low-interest bonds. The 20-year bonds, which were issued on Nov. 24, cover storm recovery costs for hurricanes Florence, Michael, and Dorian, as well as Winter Storm Diego in North Carolina, an extraordinary succession of disasters that wreaked havoc on homes and businesses.
In order to restore power to customers, Duke Energy had to fully rebuild elements of the electrical infrastructure. In the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, for example, the firm had 142 substations and 53 transmission lines out of service, as well as more than 220 miles of dead wire, 5,700 fell poles, and 2,200 damaged transformers throughout the Carolinas system. Duke Energy was recognized for its quick response time by the industry.
The North Carolina Utilities Commission (NCUC) agreed that the storm recovery expenses were prudent and that securitization would result in lower overall costs for customers in the DEP and DEC rate case orders released earlier this year.
Duke Energy executed $1 billion in hurricane recovery bond financings last month in close collaboration with the NCUC Public Staff; the overall cost to customers, including principle and interest, is $1.3 billion over the next 20 years. Duke Energy was able to save even more money by getting 20-year bonds, which increased consumer savings to 35 percent, up from the original projection of 30 percent for 15-year bonds.
Securitization is a financing method that utilities utilize to recover unanticipated costs for unusual occurrences while also saving money for their customers. The cost to Duke Energy’s North Carolina consumers for Florence, Michael, Dorian, and Diego under typical storm recovery methods would have been around $1.6 billion.
Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK) is a Fortune 150 corporation based in Charlotte, North Carolina. It is one of the major energy holding companies in the United States. Its electric utilities have a combined capacity of 51,000 megawatts and serve 7.9 million people in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. In North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky, its natural gas unit serves 1.6 million consumers. The corporation has a workforce of 27,500 individuals.
Duke Energy is pursuing a bold clean energy strategy to help its customers and communities achieve a smarter energy future, with targets of at least a 50% decrease in carbon emissions by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. The corporation is a leading provider of renewable energy in the United States, with plans to own or acquire 16,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2025. In addition, the business is investing in large electric grid upgrades and increased battery storage, as well as investigating zero-emission power generation technologies such as hydrogen and advanced nuclear.
What is Duke Energy Renewable Energy Rider, and how does it work?
In conjunction with the statewide NC GreenPower Program, Duke Energy Progress offers voluntary riders to any customer who wishes to pay a premium over their current month’s bill for either blocks of electricity generated from green power or renewable energy or blocks of carbon offset intended to reduce a participant’s carbon footprint.
In North Carolina, how many clients does Duke Energy have?
Duke Energy Carolinas, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, owns 20,200 megawatts of energy capacity, supplying electricity to 2.7 million residential, commercial and industrial customers across a 24,000-square-mile service area in North Carolina and South Carolina.
Is Dark Lightning a real phenomenon?
“Our findings show that both dark and brilliant lightning are intrinsic processes in lightning discharge,” said Nikolai Stgaard, a space scientist at the University of Bergen in Norway who led the research team.
In an article published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, he and his coworkers detail their findings.
Dark lightning is a flash of gamma rays produced by extremely fast moving electrons interacting with air molecules during thunderstorms. A terrestrial gamma ray flash is the term used by scientists to describe such a burst.
Dark lightning is the most energetic natural radiation on the planet, although it was unknown until 1991. While scientists now know that dark lightning happens naturally in thunderstorms, they are unsure how often these flashes occur or whether visible lightning is always present.
Two independent satellites, one with an optical detector and the other with a gamma ray detector, came within 300 kilometers (186 miles) of a Venezuelan storm in 2006, just as a massive lightning bolt erupted within a thundercloud. Scientists were unaware at the time that the spectacular lightning had been followed by a weak flash of dark lightning.
However, while reprocessing satellite data last year, Stgaard and his colleagues identified the previously unreported gamma ray burst. “We devised a new, enhanced search algorithm…and discovered more than twice as many terrestrial gamma flashes than had previously been recorded,” stgaard said. He and his crew noticed a gamma ray flash and a radio wave discharge just before the visible lightning.